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Barnaby Walters

Arranging atoms and pressurising air in a variety of manners, such as:

Pronouns: they/he

  1. ↪ holy indifference: I have a whole four upcoming long distance bus trips this month and ~none~ of them are with @Flixbus. What uuuuuppp finally I'm seeing other people. [...] https://rhiaro.co.uk/2018/05/upcoming-bus #travel

    Have you ever traveled on a “Vector Tours” bus? They became something of a personal legend after my Balkans trip

  2. Some tips for building a Mutable Instruments Ambika, based on my experiences:

    Based on the part numbers in the BOM, suppliers will sometimes pick a CD4050 chip. These are not fast enough and will cause SD card access to fail, it’s necessary to use a 74HC4050.

    If you’re using a 74HC4050 and SD card access is still failing, check whether communication with all of the voicecards works. I had a lot of issues where failing or badly connected voicecards would interfere with the serial lines and prevent SD card access from working.

    On that note: shell out on good quality stacking headers for the voicecards. I picked cheap ones, and suffered a long series of hard-to-debug issues caused by them not reliably connecting. I ended up having to coat all of their legs in solder to make them thick enough to reliably connect. Good headers are worth the premium to avoid these headaches.

    The 3.3V regulator, DACs and all the MCUs can be obtained free from the Microchip samples service if you’re willing to do it over a few months in limited quantities of two part numbers at a time.

    My Pololu USB AVR Programmer wasn’t able to provide enough power whilst programming, so I had to power the boards for programming. For the voicecards, having both 6 pin headers connected interfered with programming because of data being sent to the voicecards over the serial lines. I ended up powering up the motherboard, placing a stackable connector in the power/audio socket voicecard socket and plugging the voicecard into that for flashing, so that it’s powered but the serial lines are disconnected.

    I programmed my Ambika with the YAM firmware to get those smooth sounding PolyBlep square and saw waves. I built the firmware myself, downloading CrossPack 2010-01-15 which provides avr-gcc 4.3.3, the correct version for compiling most old MI AVR firmwares.

    I would recommend buying higher quality pots and encoder with metal shafts rather than the flimsy plastic ones in the BOMs. There are so few on the Ambika that the added expense is only a few euros in total. An Ambika is such a large time and financial investment that there’s really no reason to use flimsy, wobbly plastic pots.

    I got my PCBs from the Pusherman group-buy, they‘re very cheap and work fine.

  4. I built an Ambika to join my family of Walnut Mutables!

    I messed up the LED holes in this one, but the laser engraved front panel graphics and text came out really well. The back panel is acrylic so I can admire my electronics handiwork and Emilie’s amazing design any time.

    I took the opportunity to give my Shruthi a knob upgrade, too.

  5. ↪ Aaron Parecki: TIL booting to OSX "safe mode" disables the touch bar completely, so there is no way to press the escape key in safe mode

    did someone already create a USB keyboard with just the esc key on? What’s one extra dongle to a modern macbook user anyway?

  7. ♫ Folded Peaks

    beneath every surface the gnarls of a
        biological
            geological
    lifetime, revealed in passing by passing surfaces
    sudden depths, a scream erupting
    unexpectedly, harmony

    Walnut Ambika + Colorsound Overdriver

  8. ↪ Blaine Cook: Apparently personal use is exempted. Wasn't clear to me reading through, but makes sense.

    AFAIK the big questions for the “personal use” exemption is exactly where the boundary is between personal and commercial usage. Most of the stuff I read about it so far agreed that it’s vaguely worded.

  10. Successfully exhibited my acoustic/electric/electronic gurdy at the Mazurki Festival Tagowisko Instrumentow! Thanks to everyone who came by, and a special shout-out to the one person who recognised the Shruthi XT!

  11. Dramatic happenings at the mill last night! A huge dead tree fell over the bridge, causing a minor earthquake. Nobody hurt apart from a fence (which fortunately doesn’t even belong to us)

  13. ↪ Brian Suda: works on a simple iOS action extension to get you word count, reading level and (more to come) hard core writing statistics. This should work in any writing app so you never need to change your workflow. Scratching his own itch is the best kind.pic.twitter.com/JfErA0uktB

    @briansuda what on earth is “Gender: Weak Female”?!

  16. I’ll be at the Mazurki Festival Tagowisko Instrumentów (Musical Instrument Exhibition) with my instruments on Saturday the 28th. It’s not on the English programme, but is on the Polish one so is definitely happening! Come and try out my gurdies, and see my (experimental) MIDI system and hybrid synth in action!

  17. ↪ Brian Suda: Dear Lazyweb, does anyone know someone who is an expert in Art History, specifically portraitures. The, would they be interested in chatting about a potential project based on some of his crazy ideas. Mainly looking into the future of how we see ourselves based on the past.

    @briansuda clarerosehistory.com is a friend of mine in the UK. Website is mainly focused on textiles, but IIRC she also knows a lot about portraiture

  18. Hurdy Gurdy , finished and picked up by the customer!

    3x chanters, 2x drones, 2x trompettes, 4x capos, 4x sympathetic strings, 3 channel active preamp system. Very happy with how this one came out — in fact I need to retro-fit some of the electronics changes onto my own instrument… No more 50Hz hum!